For all of his garrulous charm, Joran van der Sloot didn't do himself any favors in his online interactions, where his generation tends to reveal a lot about itself.

"If I would have to describe myself as an animal it would be a snake," he wrote on his YouTube page. Perhaps wistfully wishing the past undone, he continued: "however, I want to be a lion and one day I will be a lion."

At age 22, Van der Sloot is now a caged animal. He sits in a bleak third-world prison, where he fears his fellow inmates. After requesting isolation, he shares a cellblock with a reputed Colombian murderer-for-hire.

Van der Sloot's journey from the quiet comfort of Aruba to being escorted briskly in handcuffs past Peruvian crowds screaming "murderer" is a tale of dissolution, deception and increasing desperation, according to friends and people who have chronicled his life.

Bred in privilege on a Caribbean tourist island, a high school soccer and tennis star, the handsome, physically imposing young Dutchman has fallen about as far as a young man can fall. But between the disappearance of Holloway, one year his senior, and the death of Flores, one year his junior, where was Joran Van Der Sloot? What journey led him from the ashes of one missing-persons case to the heart of a murder?